Motivation to achieve on challenging verbal and non-verbal tasks will be examined in a group of twenty normal hearing and a group of forty deaf children, ages seven to nine years. Two sets of verbal (spelling) and two sets of non-verbal (block design) tasks will be administered to each child; once when he is alone with the examiner, again when he is with his mother. Mothers will be observed assisting their children in the performance of these tasks, and their strategies of assisting, rewarding, and criticizing their child will be coded. Children will be offered a choice between an easy and a moderately difficult task in an effort to evaluate their motivation to perform challenging tasks. The analyses of the data will focus on relationships between the following dimensions: a) Children's performance; b) Children's motivation for (i.e. preference for) easy or challenging tasks; c) Maternal interaction behavior. In each of these analyses, comparisons will be made on the basis of a) Children's hearing status (deaf vs. normal hearing); and, b) Description of task (verbal vs. non-verbal).